Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Weißwurstäquator

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. W.marsh 18:49, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Weißwurstäquator

Weißwurstäquator (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Claims to be the "equator" dividing Germans who eat "white sausage" from those who do not. Unreferenced, unencyclopedic, and nonsensical. Outside Wikipedia, only 911 Google hits [1] . Fails WP:V , WP:N and WP:NEO. Edison 03:21, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

• Unsure Delete per WP:NEO? J-ſtan^Talk_Contribs 03:37, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom. Perhaps there's more to this but not that I can see. Pig^man 04:01, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. I wondered if this might be an Economistism, but I found it in several books (mainly in German of course) and the de wiki article is sourced to a dictionary. Note that you get significantly more hits when you use "ss" instead of "ß" (Google can handle the "ä", though). Importance seems limited to being some kind of metaphor for how different Bavaria is, but it does seem WP:N. (My German, and my ability to edit the article, is shaky.) --Dhartung | Talk 04:21, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• keep Reference for an instance: Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch , 6.Auflage, ISBN-10: 3-411-05506-5 ; this attempt for deletion seems to be based purely on speculative arguments not on a positive knowledge! --Kresspahl 08:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• Merge to Danube. The German article says it's a metaphor for this river. I'm German and have never heard this term (then again I don't live in this region), and I doubt the notability/significance of this word in the English language. So the best presentation is IMO in the article Danube. – sgeureka ^t•c 11:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep The team of lexicographers at the Duden presumably have better criteria for determining the notability of a neologism than number of google hits. A news archive search shows that it's been used in all the major German newspapers, even in article titles. I wouldn't support a merge to Danube because the concept is really about the cultural differences between large areas, and the river serves to demarcate them — it hasn't got much to do with the river itself. Thomjakobsen 16:42, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

  Comment So the lexicographers at the Duden dictionary have decided it is a German word and given it a dictionary definition? Then delete it as a WP:DICDEF, since Wikipedia is not a dictionary, especially not a German dictionary. Edison 02:56, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• Comment No, it is a concept which has gained sufficient recognition and coverage to warrant a dictionary entry in the German equivalent of the OED. The article discusses that concept, in a manner quite unlike a WP:DICDEF. We are using its presence in a major dictionary merely to demonstrate its considerable notability. The language is irrelevant; we cover notable concepts, and if an English word for the concept doesn't exist, we use whichever one is most natural, in this case German. Thomjakobsen 03:22, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• An entry for an English slang word or neologism in the Oxford English Dictionary would never justify an encyclopedia article about the word in the German Wikipedia. Edison 12:02, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• Again, the article is about the concept denoted by the word, not the word itself (this is the key difference between a wikipedia article and a wiktionary entry). As to the German Wikipedia: that's not relevant because we don't follow their rules here, but it's also demonstrably false: see Yuppie, McJob and Bushism for the first three examples I could find. Thomjakobsen 12:23, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• Keep, although I always herd of this cultural border referred to as the Weißwurstgrenze in Bavaria. Indeed, a google search brings up 9,870 hits for Weißwurstgrenze. Perhaps we need to move the article.--Damac 23:50, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

If you decide to delete Weißwurstgraben you have delete the Röstigraben as well.--Kresspahl 05:01, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• Keep, easily verifiable (I get about 20,000 Google hits, possibly because google.de does some different indexing and/or weighting of search resutls than google.com), widely used by the German media, and quite an interesting concept. See, historically and culturally, Germany is rather strongly divided into a Northern and a Southern part; the border, while not clearly defined, runs somewhere along the river Main where the low/high German isogloss and the dividing line between the predominantly protestant North and the predominantly catholic South more or less coincide (I know I am grossly oversimplifying here; the above is not necessarily true in a scientifically verifiable sense, but it's true in the perception of most German people which in this context is more important since the (real or imaginary) border is one of the defining aspects of German culture). The Weisswurstäquator is just the humorous form of this concept and is quite often used as such in the German media. I agree that the article as it stands now is not exactly a stellar example of a well-referenced, interesting article, but that can be fixed and in itself does not warrant deletion. -- Ferkelparade π 23:50, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep per Ferkelparade. How very strange. CRGreathouse (t | c) 02:26, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't make it "unencyclopaedic and nonsensical". And it's now referenced too. PeteVerdon 10:22, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Widely known in Germany. I have created and added an audio file *G*. --Neg 18:21, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.